Tread Lightly
by Rhian Evelscire
Summary: Imagine a world where Kyoko doesn't understand and/or accept Ren's feelings for her in time.  Ren gives up on her.  What then?  The path of love doesn't always run smoothly and it may not end where lovers hope it will. Consider yourselves warned.


Tread Lightly

**AN (a):**

I have finally returned to ffnet under a new pen name and email address – I was previously Elysian Winter but I forgot my password and I stopped receiving ffnet emails despite the many, many times I tried the recover password feature. Hence the new start. During my hiatus, I discovered Skip Beat!; if people who read my previous account find this – consider all my Elysian Winter publications abandoned. Although I may pick up the Harry Potter family fic I was working on. Anyway, that's how things are now; on to the story.

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Prologue

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Hizuri Kuon had been asleep for five long years. As he slumbered, Tsuruga Ren lived in his body, breathing in Kuon's place. But since the appearance of Mogami Kyoko in Ren's life shafts of sunlight had begun to pierce the silent darkness in which Kuon slept. The heart of the boy Kuon had been at fifteen was slowly bleeding into the man Tsuruga Ren was at twenty-one. The clock was spinning back. All because _she_ was part of his life again.

At fifteen Kuon had chosen to immerse himself into acting. For as long as it took, he would disappear behind the mask of a character and would not emerge again as himself until the day his fame became indestructible wings which his father's hands couldn't impede. He chose Tsuruga Ren as his base; the mask that he would keep longest of all. It was the one mask that was required to be infallible. And it had begun to crack. Prepared or not, Kuon was beginning to wake up.

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Being in love is painful for him; far more painful than either Tsuruga Ren or the true actor, Hizuri Kuon, ever thought it would be. If he had a choice in the matter, he would not have chosen to love her. From the time she was a child and even now in a way, her world was about _him_; her chosen prince, Fuwa Sho. And now he feels as if he wars against the will of the gods by choosing to pursue her. Ren has ignored the sign plastered over the gate he has chosen to open. _'This way lays pain and struggle, tempered only by unlikely and uncertain joy.' _Yet he has chosen to follow the path anyway.

In unguarded moments when he is alone in Tsuruga Ren's apartment Kuon reflects that he never planned for a tendency to masochism to be a part of Ren's character profile. And when he considers that this is a part of himself he is discovering, his mind rebels against acceptance. For years he lived with pain and struggle; a much more likely explanation for his disturbing taste in women is that he is simply accustomed to pain. His world would feel incomplete without agony at this point he reasons. He doesn't know how to function in a world devoid of suffering. The thought depresses him, but it is better than believing himself to be a masochist. Surely he has not become warped to that point? After that moment at 2:13 in the morning, surely he had hit rock bottom?

Kuon doesn't let himself think about the future with Mogami Kyoko. All that exists is the past and present and he forges their future in every moment. Thinking about the future would mean thinking about the possibility of failure. He would have to imagine a world where he fails to sever the string of fate that seems to tie her to Fuwa. When he left himself and his past behind in America he thought only of reaching beyond the agony of failure. Hizuri Kuon has known enough of failure to last him a lifetime; he will not let himself entertain thoughts of failing in this crucial arena.

Somewhere, in a corner of his mind that he chooses never to illuminate with consideration, hides the belief that he wouldn't be able to survive failing with Kyoko. She matters more than his life as an actor. More and more he is coming to believe that if it came down to a choice between keeping her and going home, his parents would never see their son again. Thankfully, the issue is moot at this point because she already loves his father as if he were her own and he knows she'll love his mother; he will never have to choose.

But in loving Mogami Kyoko, some pain is unavoidable. Although what now consumes her heart when she thinks of Fuwa is hatred instead of the love which would likely have shut him out forever; whenever he is near, her world still narrows to it being just the two of them. Either in love or hate she regards Fuwa with such single-minded passion, that it terrifies him. If she were able to forgive Fuwa…he could lose her to that obnoxious bottle-blond musician all too easily. What's more is Fuwa knows this and what's worse is that Kyoko doesn't. She hasn't escaped from Fuwa Sho at all; her passionate hatred of him keeps her heart his prisoner. And Kyoko is nowhere near cognizant of the fact that contrary to what she believes, the boy is in love with her. And unfortunately for Kuon, Fuwa has no qualms about exploiting her passionate hatred of him to ensure that she can't have her heart back to give to anyone else.

Sometimes Kuon is furious with her for her continued hatred of Fuwa, unreasonable as that is. Until she is able to respond to Fuwa with indifference, the likelihood of her recognizing his love and having the ability to reciprocate it is extremely low. But still Kuon (in the mask of Trusruga Ren) tries to penetrate the titanium matrix enclosed around her heart. As long as there is a fool's chance that she can return his love, he will try.

But the day is dawning and Yashiro will be arriving soon. It's time to put the Tsuruga Ren mask back on and return to the difficult business of living within the play. Without word or sound, Kuon retreats into the shadows of his own mind.

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**AN (b):**

Because I know someone is going to protest to my summary, let me defend my premise right off the bat. In the real world happily ever after doesn't always happen. As someone who's often escaped into the imaginary world of fictional works when my life got hard I want to be the kind of writer who helps readers prepare for painful aspects of their realities in a safe environment. I'm love happy endings as much as the next person but I'm with Dumbledore when he says "it doesn't do to dwell on dreams, and forget to live".

It's not okay to live in our imaginations and miss out on what our lives have to offer. We don't live in fairy tales – and in our real lives we sometimes suffer. Stories shouldn't just be a safe haven where you can live in a kinder world for a while; they should also prepare you to cope with the challenges of your real life.

Now having said that, just to mess with you all, this won't necessarily be a story where Kyoko and Ren don't end up together in the end. I haven't decided whether the ending will be happy or sad yet. I'm going to see where the story takes me.


End file.
